


#826: Nerd Voices

by fiercynn



Category: National Public Radio RPF
Genre: 2008 United States Presidential Election, Gen, Music, Politics, This American Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-20
Updated: 2009-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-04 17:17:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiercynn/pseuds/fiercynn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sarah often tells interviewers that Ira's true genius is in editing, picking apart stories and putting them back together in the most compelling way possible; the part she leaves out is that he'll first indulge every single idea that you have, playing devil's advocate for every whim or tangential interest just so that you check it out. Then once you have a semblance of a story, <i>that's</i> when he'll tear it apart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	#826: Nerd Voices

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bessemerprocess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bessemerprocess/gifts).



> Thanks to glass_moment for looking over this!

_Everyone loves a Cinderella story – or better, a Horatio Alger story - the poor, deserving, person who wins out in the end, whether because of their beauty, pure-heartedness, or other such obvious virtues._

But do people love a Bill Gates story, where the winner may be deserving but is also an infuriating know-it-all and geek? These days, the stories that we see in popular culture tell us that we do. Well, from WEB-Easy Chicago, I'm Ira Glass with This American Life. Today we bring you three stories of real-life nerds, formerly considered losers in the harsh environments of their childhood and adolescence, who eventually made it in the world, whether by gaining fame and popularity or just by fulfilling their personal goals. And speaking from personal experience, it can be harder than it sounds.

*

It's crowded, incredibly crowded. At least half of DC's population must be out here, as well as the other hundred thousand people who have come into town for the inauguration a few days early. Not that Sarah can blame them; they're all here for the same reason, and that on its own feels amazing.

"Good thing we got here early," Ira says as they try to get as close to the foot of the Memorial as possible, weaving through individual clusters of people, from college kids excitedly texting their friends to middle-aged couples with lawn chairs, and passing between people selling every kind of Obama merchandise on the planet. Ira is tempted to get a book of Obama paper dolls just to be able to say that he has one, but if he falls behind now he'll probably never be able to find David and Sarah again.

They reach a spot at the edge of the pool that David seems to find acceptable, stopping and rubbing his hands together. Sarah and Ira join him at the fence, leaning over to check out their view of the stage. Worst-case scenario, there's a Megatron only thirty feet or so away from them.

Ira grins at the two of them. It's not often that they get to just spend time together outside a studio or a stage. It's one of the many downsides of general popularity and fame that makes David feel like a hypocrite for thinking it.

But this, this is nice.

"I still can't quite believe we're here," David says.

"You can't believe _we're_ here, or you can't believe we're _here_?" asks Sarah.

"Both, kind of," David replies. He turns to Ira. "By the way, have I offered you my daily oath of gratitude for jumpstarting my entire career and thus my current life?"

Ira waves a hand. "Every other day is good enough for me."

"What I find harder to believe is that there was any doubt of Obama winning," Sarah says. "I mean, I remember the fear and uncertainty that went into that election, of _course_, but looking around now? It seems so inevitable."

"I'll remind you of that next time you get overwhelmingly stressed out about an election," says David.

"Oh, look who's _talking_."

*

_I look at these people and can't quite believe they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?_

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. "Can I interest you in the chicken?" she asks. "Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?"

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

\- David Sedaris, "Undecided". _The New Yorker_, October 27, 2008.

*

"Actually, I wasn't quite sure how you'd feel about this event, Sarah," Ira admits.

If David looks back, he can see that the crowd has filled up past the World War II Memorial, stretching back towards the Washington Monument, and the show hasn't even started. They're still testing out the Megatrons, tweaking the inevitable technical difficulties with sound and the camera's zoom.

"Are you kidding?" says Sarah. "It's a rock concert – kind of – celebrating Obama's inauguration, at the _Lincoln Memorial_. What's not to love?"

"The Reflecting Pool, for one thing," says David. "January is really not its time of year. I don't know how they ever manage to make it look so romantic in movies – do they clean it out every time? Or just Photoshop?"

"I'll clarify: what's not for _me_ to like?"

Ira shrugs. "Sometimes you have very specific ideas about what counts as commemorative and what you think is just cheesy."

"This election may have removed my capacity to identify cheesiness. My cheese filter has been corrupted with unadulterated optimism." Sarah grins. "Somehow, I managed to make that itself sound cheesy."

David smiles back. He won't admit it to many people, but the day of Obama's election was the closest he's ever come to wanting to move back to the States. He and Hugh had even talked about it a little. Being here, especially with his friends – Ira, the one who discovered him, the nation's story-teller extraordinaire; and Sarah, his comrade-in-comedy, with her conditional reverence for American history and presidents – puts him close to that feeling again, an almost to that almost-feeling.

He's not going to leave France. But it's nice to want to.

"Anyway," says Sarah, "regardless of Lincoln himself, he's been considered Obama's inspirational, hovering specter for a while. So this might be appropriate."

"Someone asked me if I thought Lincoln might count as Obama's requisite wizard mentor, and if so, did I think he was more like Dumbledore, Merlin, Gandalf, or Obi-Wan," Ira muses. "It was an interesting question, if a little patronizing."

"What was your answer?"

"I think the real question is, who is Obama in this situation?"

"I'd say King Arthur, if only because all of the others are reluctant heroes," David decides. "Whatever this means for his future and personal sanity, right now, he's _thrilled_."

"Aren't we all?" Sarah asks, and it's so wonderfully, amazingly true.

*

_Any politician tricky enough to get elected to the House, not to mention the vice presidency, must necessarily have the kind of postmodern mind which thinks simultaneously about both what he is saying and the way he is saying it. As a national Democrat, Gore has had to frame his arguments about, say, energy policy, remembering that his support base includes both the United Auto Workers and the members of the Sierra Club. So he already has the cerebral capability required to give a proper name-heavy speech about the China conundrum followed by an icebreaking wisecrack about not going to the prom. It's silly, demeaning, and time-consuming, for sure, but for a nerd, what part of driving a tank or pulling on cowboy boots is not? _

Any person who wants any job, who knows he would be good at the job, knows he has to fake his way through the dumb job interview before he's actually allowed to roll up his sleeves. I asked [my friend] Doug what he thought would have happened in the campaign if, instead of donning khakis and cowboy boots and French-kissing his wife on TV, Gore had been truer to himself and said what he thought and knew and believed using the nerd voice. Doug didn't hesitate: "Oh my God, he'd be president for life."

I wish it were different. I wish that we had privileged knowledge in politicians, that the ones who know things didn't have to hide it behind brown pants, and that the know-not-enoughs were laughed all the way to the Main border on their first New Hampshire meet and greet. I wish that in order to secure his party's nomination, a presidential candidate would be required to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the periodic table of the elements memorized; rattle off the kings and queens of Spain; define the significance of the Gatling gun; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism in seventeenth-century Dutch painting; explain photosynthesis to a six-year-old; recite Emily Dickenson; bake a perfect popover; build a shortwave radio out of a coconut; and know all the words to Hoagy Carmichael's "Two Sleepy People", Johnny Cash's "Five Feet High and Rising", and "You Got the Silver" by the Rolling Stones. After all, the United States is the greatest country on earth dealing with the most complicated problems in the history of the world — poverty, pollution, justice, Jerusalem. What we need is a president who is at least twelve kinds of nerd, a nerd messiah to come along every four years, acquire the Secret Service code name Poindexter, install a Revenge of the Nerds screen saver on the Oval Office computer, and one by one decrypt our woes.

\- Sarah Vowell, "The Nerd Voice". _The Partly Cloudy Patriot_, 2003.

*

"I don't think I'll be able to write about this inauguration," says Sarah.

Ira remembers Sarah's essay about attending Bush's inauguration in 2000, the one about how Al Gore might have one if he'd just lived up to being the nerd to Bush's unrepentant jock. It's one of his favorite pieces she's written. "Why?"

"Well, the nerds have won. Right? First we had Gore's rise to fame based on things like Rin Tin Tin references and 'I'm just a guy with a slide-show'. He's become a celebrity by giving people lectures on _global warming_. And now Obama, who is one of those good-looking, self-assured, popular nerds that everyone loves despite themselves."

"I'm not following why you can't write about this."

"What do the nerds do when they win?"

David and Ira ponder for a moment. "There's not much of a precedent," says David.

"Nothing," Sarah informs them. "We may give off the great arrogance and reverse-elitism when we're in the losing category because we have something to be self-righteous about –"

"Not to mention _right_ –" David puts in.

"– but when we win, we go back to the self-deprecation, the 'oh we only won by fluke, it won't last, no point in gloating over it when we're just going to regret it later' attitude."

"Nerdiness: that eternal paradox of ridiculous idealism about the world and extreme pessimism about their own lives."

"You could write about how you can't write about it," Ira suggests.

That's…actually not a bad idea. Sarah considers it. "'The Nerd Voice 2.0: Silence of the Nerds'?"

"Why not. It could be a round-about way of gloating, one of those, 'I'm not going to say this incredibly apt and funny punch line that I have because it'll make me sound like a jerk, but by telling you that I'm not going to say it, I actually did'. But, funnier."

Sarah often tells interviewers that Ira's true genius is in editing, picking apart stories and putting them back together in the most compelling way possible; the part she leaves out is that he'll first indulge every single idea that you have, playing devil's advocate for every whim or tangential interest just so that you check it out. Then once you have a semblance of a story, _that's_ when he'll tear it apart. Sarah gets it, that encouragement for even the most trivial passions just so that you are passionate about something, but in the end you have to do it _right_.

"Maybe," Sarah concedes. "We'll see how Tuesday goes."

The concert begins soon after that, a parade of speakers and musicians, from Denzel Washington to Jack Black, from Shakira to Bruce Springsteen, everyone celebrating what's in the cold January days to come.

"Tom Hanks!" Sarah says delightedly when he comes to the podium. "Do you think he'll do a Forrest Gump and the speakers will cut out?"

"You never know what you're gonna get," Ira smirks.

"Just as long as no one actually decides to run through the Reflecting Pool," says David. "_Seriously_."

*

_Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether"_

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

\- Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, 1865.

*

It's not until Stevie Wonder comes on that Sarah starts tearing up.

"'Higher Ground' may be one of my favorite songs ever," she says after wiping her eyes. David puts an arm around her shoulders and he may be crying a little too, though he says nothing.

And this is why Ira loves these people that he oh-so-luckily came upon at open-mics and book readings: they're brilliant and talented, with an acerbic humor that he has always found funny, but underneath they're all heart. Whether it's trivial passions for the sake of passion, or unflinching hope that's only expressed through comedy and self-deprecation, he knows that they will always, always care.

He joins them on Sarah's other side and puts his own arm around them, drawing them all in together, and he's just a little absurdly glad that for once, no one has anything funny to say.

*

_Thanks for listening – I'm Ira Glass. We'll be back next week with more stories of This American Life. _


End file.
